Patch Tuesday Rolls Around With Six Bulletins

It’s that time of the month again: Today is Patch Tuesday, the one Tuesday of the month where Microsoft releases a set of updates to fix nasty — or mild — security issues with its products, and The Next Web has blogged about the riveting, earth-shattering updates that this month has to offer, along with some shiny charts that Microsoft released to spice up this otherwise boring blog post.

Of the updates — six in all — one is rated as ‘moderate’, four ‘important’, and one ‘critical’. In order of least important to most, at a glance the updates address security issues with DirectWrite, DNS, the Kernel, Visual Studio, Expression Design, and RDP. What’s ‘critical’ about the RDP bug? The Microsoft Security Response Center blog elaborates:

MS12-020 (Windows): This bulletin addresses one Critical-class issue and one Moderate-class issue in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Both issues were cooperatively disclosed to Microsoft and we know of no active exploitation in the wild. The Critical-class issue applies to a fairly specific subset of systems – those running RDP – and is less problematic for those systems with Network Level Authentication (NLA) enabled. That said, we strongly recommend that customers examine and prepare to apply this bulletin as soon as possible. The Critical-class issue could allow a would-be attacker to achieve remote code execution on a machine running RDP (a non-default configuration); if the machine does not have NLA enabled, the attacker would not require authentication for RCE access.

They’ve also included some shiny charts to visually present the fixes in a sleek, attractive manner. Here they are: